Curtain - Agatha Christie [64]
‘Then you don’t believe,’ I said, ‘that he shot himself ?’
Slowly Poirot shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Norton did not shoot himself. He was deliberately killed.’
IV
I went downstairs in a daze. The thing was so inexplicable I may be forgiven, I hope, for not seeing the next inevitable step. I was dazed. My mind was not working properly.
And yet it was so logical. Norton had been killed – why? To prevent, or so I believed, his telling what he had seen.
But he had confided that knowledge to one other person.
So that person, too, was in danger . . .
And was not only in danger, but was helpless.
I should have known.
I should have foreseen . . .
‘Cher ami!’ Poirot had said to me as I left the room.
They were the last words I was ever to hear him say. For when Curtiss came to attend to his master he found that master dead . . .
Chapter 18
I
I don’t want to write about it at all.
I want, you see, to think about it as little as possible. Hercule Poirot was dead – and with him died a good part of Arthur Hastings.
I will give you the bare facts without embroidery. It is all I can bear to do.
He died, they said, of natural causes. That is to say he died of a heart attack. It was the way, so Franklin said, that he had expected him to go. Doubtless the shock of Norton’s death brought one on. By some oversight, it seems, the amyl nitrate ampoules were not by his bed.
Was it an oversight? Did someone deliberately remove them? No, it must have been something more than that. X could not count on Poirot’s having a heart attack.
For, you see, I refuse to believe that Poirot’s death was natural. He was killed, as Norton was killed, as Barbara Franklin was killed. And I don’t know why they were killed – and I don’t know who killed them!
There was an inquest on Norton and a verdict of suicide. The only point of doubt was raised by the surgeon who said it was unusual for a man to shoot himself in the exact centre of his forehead. But that was the only shadow of doubt. The whole thing was so plain. The door locked on the inside, the key in the dead man’s pocket, the windows closely shuttered, the pistol in his hand. Norton had complained of headaches, it seemed, and some of his investments had been doing badly lately. Hardly reasons for suicide, but they had to put forward something.
The pistol was apparently his own. It had been seen lying on his dressing-table twice by the housemaid during his stay at Styles. So that was that. Another crime beautifully stage-managed and as usual with no alternative solution.
In the duel between Poirot and X, X had won.
It was now up to me.
I went to Poirot’s room and took away the despatch box.
I knew that he had made me his executor, so I had a perfect right to do so. The key was round his neck.
In my own room I opened the box.
And at once I had a shock. The dossiers of X’s cases were gone. I had seen them there only a day or two previously when Poirot unlocked it. That was proof, if I had been needing it, that X had been at work. Either Poirot had destroyed those papers himself (most unlikely) or else X had done so.
X. X. That damned fiend X.
But the case was not empty. I remembered Poirot’s promise that I should find other indications which X would not know about.
Were these the indications?
There was a copy of one of Shakespeare’s plays, Othello, in a small cheap edition. The other book was the play John Fergueson by St John Ervine. There was a marker in it at the third act.
I stared at the two books blankly.
Here were the clues that Poirot had left for me – and they meant nothing to me at all!
What could they mean?
The only thing I could think of was a code of some kind. A word code based on the plays.
But if so, how was I to get at it?
There were no words, no letters, underlined anywhere. I tried gentle heat with no result.
I read the third act of John Fergueson carefully through. A most admirable and